Flat holography and Carrollian fluids

TL;DR

The paper establishes a precise bridge between AdS holography and flat holography by taking the zero cosmological constant limit of the fluid/gravity derivative expansion. It shows that a Carrollian geometry and a conformal Carrollian fluid on a 2D boundary surface at null infinity encode the full dynamics needed to reconstruct four-dimensional Ricci-flat spacetimes, provided specific integrability (resummability) conditions are met. Through a flat-derivative expansion and its Carrollian limit, the authors derive closed-form Ricci-flat metrics that are algebraically special and classify them via Carrollian data, including Cotton descendants. Concrete examples demonstrate the duality: conformal Carrollian perfect fluids map to Kerr–Taub–NUT spacetimes, while vorticity-free Carrollian fluids map to Robinson–Trautman spacetimes. This framework clarifies flat holography, reveals deep links between boundary Carrollian dynamics and bulk gravitational structure, and opens avenues for exploring BMS symmetries and Carrollian thermodynamics in holography.

Abstract

We show that a holographic description of four-dimensional asymptotically locally flat spacetimes is reached smoothly from the zero-cosmological-constant limit of anti-de Sitter holography. To this end, we use the derivative expansion of fluid/gravity correspondence. From the boundary perspective, the vanishing of the bulk cosmological constant appears as the zero velocity of light limit. This sets how Carrollian geometry emerges in flat holography. The new boundary data are a two-dimensional spatial surface, identified with the null infinity of the bulk Ricci-flat spacetime, accompanied with a Carrollian time and equipped with a Carrollian structure, plus the dynamical observables of a conformal Carrollian fluid. These are the energy, the viscous stress tensors and the heat currents, whereas the Carrollian geometry is gathered by a two-dimensional spatial metric, a frame connection and a scale factor. The reconstruction of Ricci-flat spacetimes from Carrollian boundary data is conducted with a flat derivative expansion, resummed in a closed form in Eddington-Finkelstein gauge under further integrability conditions inherited from the ancestor anti-de Sitter set-up. These conditions are hinged on a duality relationship among fluid friction tensors and Cotton-like geometric data. We illustrate these results in the case of conformal Carrollian perfect fluids and Robinson-Trautman viscous hydrodynamics. The former are dual to the asymptotically flat Kerr-Taub-NUT family, while the latter leads to the homonymous class of algebraically special Ricci-flat spacetimes.